Overheard outside of the "English for Engineers" class, while people were waiting for it to start, presumably discussing the about-to-be-turned-in draft of a group paper: "I just made a few semantic changes, to make the sentences flow better"" Apparently, altering the fundamental meaning of sentences is fine, so long as you sound good when you are done.
'Semantic' is right up there with 'ironic' as one of the most poorly used words in the English language. It's really much worse though, because while ironic has only expanded to include a lot more than it originally meant, semantic is used almost exclusively as the exact opposite of its actual meaning—in fact, if people knew they were doing it, they would be being ironic (but that in itself is not ironic, it's just kind of funny).
Of course, it's almost certainly the fault of the phrase "arguing semantics", which is a phrase that almost no-one who uses it actually understands. Being curious about language, I often wonder how thing like that happen. All I can think is that it was used to dismiss people who were trying to twist things by claiming that some word or another didn't really stand for its obvious meaning. So, if I say "I like blue better than red", and you say, "Yes, but what do you mean by blue? Do you prefer the shorter wavelength of the light? Do you like things that absorb blue light better, or things that reflect blue light?" then you are just arguing semantics; you are arguing about the meaning of the word blue, when you know full well that all I'm saying is that, given the choice between a blue shirt and a red shirt, I'll take the blue one.
But of course, people just hear it used dismissively, so they infer that it means arguing about things that aren't important, and then assume that semantics are the piddly details that don't matter. And so, as a result, many people think that syntax and semantics are the same thing, instead of fundamental opposites.
But, since it is used incorrectly so often, the issue of how it should be used is, in the end, a moot point
Category: Language
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